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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Have to say my experience of propofol was pretty interesting.

It's this milky substance that is injected directly into your blood. The action seems to be super fast and super deep.

I remember the anesthetist talking to me while doing it, I think it's standard practice, and I pretty much vanished mid-sentence. As in, not just "I feel like I'm sleeping" that you get each morning or evening in bed, more like "time just vanished" kind of way.

Very hard to explain the speed with which you drop from awake to sort of sleeping to "there is no me". The way back is a bit slower but harder to pinpoint, but I knew something was different in the recovery room.

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"Very hard to explain the speed with which you drop from awake to sort of sleeping to "there is no me". The way back is a bit slower but harder to pinpoint, but I knew something was different in the recovery room."

There was no perception of speed in my case.

I just have a distinct memory of a mask being put over my mouth and nose and the nurse/doctor telling me to count upwards... and then I was in the recovery room.

No gap, no memory of going under or anything that happened in between. It's like the intervening time didn't happen.

Much like waking up from a dreamless sleep.

> No gap, no memory of going under or anything that happened in between. It's like the intervening time didn't happen.

I had the same experience 2 weeks ago when being put under with propofol.

They asked me to hold a mask against my face and to start counting and then that's it, I woke up in recovery.

It was like I blinked and the whole thing was over.

Did not feel anything 'coming on' or like I was loosing consciousness, I was fully conscious and aware of all my surroundings, and then, bang, was in recovery.

Strange experience.

I've been thinking a lot about my same experience. I also spoke to her as it was kicking in.

It was humbling. Like a computer being turned off, and then back on an hour later.

For that time, I didn't exist. It helped convince me that after death there is just.... Nothing.

This seems like an assertion based on incomplete evidence. Not saying you're indelibly wrong, but presuming there is such a thing, one would think it's infallible, and thus you're not going to accidentally slip into paradise before your allotted time.

Most ideas about life after death are based on the assumption that because we have consciousness, it can't just "stop existing" as a true nothingness. Ask someone to picture that, and they picture a black void that they still experience.

So it seems sensible to me that General Aneasthesia would feel quite unique in that regard (I have experience it myself) - one moment you're here, the next you're waking up. You don't dream, you don't feel like time has passed at all, it's just kind of a blink and then you're somewhere else.

And that's it - "true nothingness". It's the closest you can get to not existing while still being able to come back.

I had surgery last year and I believe I was out for a few hours. when I woke up I could definitely sense that some amount of time had had passed. I haven't felt that sensation during quicker surgeries so maybe our perception of how quickly time passes is changed and slowed down?

I think a good way to imagine non-existence it is to ask people to think about how they feel about the time before they were born. It's better than that idea of a black void that some get, and it tends to better illustrate the concept that the world once existed without you experiencing it, and so there is nothing weird about it existing again without you experiencing it in any way.

I think this is a cheat.

If instead we found someone who (for whatever reason) believed that they just popped into existence, as if from a puff of smoke, at the age of 3... and we did your thought exercise but instead told them "think back to the 3 years before you manifested"...

To that person, it might well seem like a clever idea. "Hey I didn't exist then, but I don't really experience or remember that nothingness!"

Except they did exist, may well have been conversational even for the last part of it, etc.

There's no good way from first principles for me to be sure the same isn't true of myself before my birth. I don't expect much after my death, but like everyone else I'm just going to have to wait and see (or, wait and not see, as the case may be).

Oh, I'm not claiming I've solved the mystery of what happens after death!

I'm just saying this may be a good way to help someone visualize better what it even means to say that consciousness just stops, not that it somehow proves that is what happens.

I wonder if going under anesthesia is different though due to the time involved. Like, if you're under for 4 hours, you'll feel like no time has passed. But what about 4 days? Or 4 months?

If death is infinite, to really compare death and anesthesia, we'd need to experience being under for longer.

Perhaps our consciousness existed in some spiritual way, but no memories got translated to our biology.

You ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in?

I think changes in perspective break memory.

Greater changes mean greater breakage.

Walking into another room is a change. sleeping, dying, Weird drugs. Those are also changes.

Also, there is a degree of breakability/flexibility, inherent to the person. Depending on various stuff.

And there are ways to become more flexible too. Less prone to breaking. This leads to phenomena like "lucid dreaming".

That seems a somewhat hasty assumption, given at no point did you die.

No, they lost themselves completely to something much less destructive than death. If a chemical causes a complete cessation of self it only follows that's brain death would as well, unless propofol somehow affects your ethereal spirit more effectively than your brain literally decomposing.

While I don't intend to make any actual assertions in either direction, I do feel bound to note that the experience of being anesthetized isn't really incompatible with a concept of souls and of ensoulment. After all, under anesthesia there remains something to "come back" to. When dead, not so much.

My theory is that death is different than taking propofol or some other anesthesia because while you are taking those drugs, your cells are still living. Your brain cells are not dieing and producing decomposition chemicals everywhere.

I think that's in the difference. When dead, your cells all decompose and start releasing and forming decomposition compounds which flood your brain and body. Not to mention your cells becoming fundamentally broken and unable to do their jobs.

My theory is that there's a fundamental system in the brain that gives us our sense of self gives us our sense of "this is me, and that is everything else". And that slowly goes away to the point where you can't distinguish the difference between self and other and you become everything.

Interestingly, entheogens as a category of drug have been defined by the same ablation of self/other boundary that you describe. (Please don't ask me for a citation! I remember seeing this definition in the context of MDMA's inclusion in the category, but have no idea where.)

That's a beautiful way of looking at the experience of being conscious of self, thank you for sharing it. I'm going to keep that in mind.

It seems that when you die, memory and the capacity for thought are irretrievably lost. It seems that consciousness is separate from memory and thinking. What happens to consciousness when we die? It's reasonable to think the same thing happens as when we're unconscious. It seems that being unconscious (through sleep or aneasthetic or some other method) is a reversible death. Maybe consciousness is always there, but experiencing something else, just not our brains?

Why would consciousness be different from memory and thinking? I don't think there's even an agreement on what consciousness IS. Or even, is consciousness even a thing? Or is it a label we give ourselves to separate us from other things?

Not sure what exactly they gave me, but I had 2 cases:

(1) In a hospital, when after injection with a syringe, I lay for maybe 5-15 minutes, wondering when it would show any effect and what would happen, if I tried to stay away, before it was suddenly lights out.

(2) Another one at a doctor for a check of something, which was injected into the bloodstream directly without a syringe, but a drip/line. That one affected me very quickly and I remember suddenly having a weird smell in my nose, saying something like "hm smells funny" and then I was out. It was an interesting experience. Not a bad one. Not a good one. Just interesting.

Afterwards I did not have memory of either one. But at the second one, I remember, that it took time, before I could reliably stand and walk and I sat down for a while, thinking, that the feeling was also "funny". At the first one it was an operation after which one usually does not walk and stays in bed for a while. Also the one for the operation must have lasted much longer, since I woke up much later, afaik.

I've been administered propofol before, and I've experienced syncope before. They're a great deal alike. If anything, the most notable difference is that propofol takes long enough you can feel it coming on, which is more than I've ever been able to say for old-fashioned passing out.

I don't find anything to choose between the experience of coming out of it and that of waking somewhat slowly from deep, dreamless sleep, except incidentally that one typically falls asleep and wakes up in the same place. The discontinuity of awareness "feels" the same in both cases. For that matter, going under propofol feels a lot like falling asleep while deeply exhausted, except without the actual exhaustion, which is in my view the strangest thing about it.

In my mostly misspent youth, and long prior to my first experience of general anesthesia, I once had occasion to try what was then and might still be called "whippets", or the inhalation of carbon dioxide for theoretically recreational purposes. Stupid and pointless as this is and was, in hindsight it was much as if one were under propofol able to pause just before the point of entering discontinuity of conscious experience. That was deeply unpleasant in a way I find impossible to explain, but enough so that if forced to choose I believe I'd prefer to undergo surgery again. As with being around heroin addicts whose habit one does not share, it's the sort of thing that should quickly, and quite rightly, lead one to decide that a scene where this is ordinary is a scene where one does not wish to belong.

> carbon dioxide

You probably mean nitrous oxide (N₂O). Both are sold in small aluminum canisters for culinary use. CO₂ is acidic and is quite unpleasant to inhale. N₂O is listed in the article (Table 1) as one of the inhalant anesthetics.

I had the experience of going through both IV general anesthesia (presumably propofonol) and syncope in the last two weeks and for me propofonol was much faster getting in and out of: like falling asleep and I woke pleasantly remembering a dream. Syncope for me was much harsher: tunnel vision as a passed out and I came by initially not remembering where or who I was, like my brain did a cold boot.

You're right, it was nitrous oxide. I gather also the name originates from a trademark "Whip-its" under which these "charger" canisters are sold.

This was probably all explained to me at the time, but mainly what I remember of it is a large balloon followed by spending an indefinite but subjectively very long time in a clangingly silent gray hell.

Michael Jackson was known to refer to propofol as "Milk of Amnesia". He loved his propofol very much. He loved it unto death. He had a private physician who didn't ask a lot of questions or put up a lot of objections to Michael's idiosyncrasies.

Gosh, scary. I still remember watching the news the day he was still alive, talking about how half his body was hot and the other half was cold. The human body scares me.

but during sleeping time also kind of vanishes? Seems like propofol skips the being-tired stage that precedes sleep but otherwise..

I often remember my dreams. My wife is always amazed that I remember so many of them (she hardly remembers any). But I never ever remembered a single "dream" I made under anaesthesia.

I wonder if people who remember many of their dreams have different experience? To me it's pretty much like GP: mid sentence and then boom, gone.

there is also retrograde amnesia. people live and feel. then suffer amnesia and can't remember having lived and felt. doesn't mean they didn't live and feel, though.

I usually don't remember my dreams (and if I do, memories are usually very vague). However, I still have a sense of time passing when I sleep - ie: I wake up in the morning and I feel like some number of hours have passed since I went to sleep, even if I can't remember what happened during those hours.

I've been under general anaesthesia once, and there was no sense of time passing. One instant I was in the OR, the next I was in the PACU. If you'd asked me, I'd have had no way of telling you if I'd been out for 20 minutes or 8 hours (I was out for about three).

Yes, that is what felt so strange. It's like you're awake, you feel a bit of cold in your arm, then you're waking up. No in between, just snap fingers and you are elsewhere.

Sleeping usually retains the feeling of time passing. Propofol is just a complete removal of consciousness in my opinion the same as just being dead

This was also my propofol experience. The doctor injected a tiny bit by accident before I had to sign a form and I felt so removed from consciousness it was weird. Then he pushed the rest and next instant of time I was in the recovery room but it felt like the best sleep I’ve ever had in my life. No wonder people get addicted to it

I’m not sure if I had the same drug, but I had the same experience, but I also remember the feeling of progressively vanishing in a couple of seconds starting from the injection site progressing upwards to my head probably because the drug took a bit of time to circulate.

I've gone under a few times as a child. I remember it as just closing my eyes and then opening them. No in-between. Absolutely no dreams, memories, or anything. Just an instant time shift ahead for however long i was under.

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